Lorraine Williams

Lorraine Dille Williams is an American businesswoman.

Lorraine Williams is the granddaughter of John F. Dille who, while president of the National Newspaper Service syndicate in the 1920s, arranged for Buck Rogers to be turned into a syndicated comic strip.

After Dille's death in 1957, ownership of Buck Rogers and other works passed into the Dille Family Trust through the Dille family trust, making Williams one of the beneficiaries of the Buck Rogers franchise.

The Dille family retained the licensing of Buck Rogers, as well as a collection of Buck Rogers memorabilia that John F. Dille had accumulated over thirty years.

Williams attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. in history.

After graduating, she worked at the National Newspaper Syndicate.

She then became an assistant administrator at the Rush-Presbyterian-St.

Luke's Medical Center.

Later, she joined the National Easter Seal Society, where she worked as an administrator.

During the 1980s, TSR was the top games company in North America.

Gary Gygax, co-inventor of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and partner in the company TSR, had been sent to Hollywood in 1982 to work on licensing the Dungeons & Dragons brand, leaving the day-to-day operations of TSR to his fellow board members, Kevin and Brian Blume.

While in Hollywood, he was involved in the making of the Dungeons & Dragons animated television show and exploring the possibility of a film adaptation of the game.

In the course of his work, Gygax met Flint Dille, with whom he collaborated on a series of choose-your-own-adventure-type novels and a script for an unmade Dungeons & Dragons film.

She was hired as manager of TSR, Inc. by company co-founder Gary Gygax in 1984, and was in charge of the table game company from 1986 to 1997.

In 1984, Gygax was alerted to the fact that TSR was $1.5 million in debt and the Blumes were looking for a buyer.

In an attempt to bring new investment money into the company, Gygax asked Flint Dille to arrange a meeting with his sister, Lorraine Williams.

Although Williams turned down Gygax's invitation to invest in TSR, Gygax did hire her, on the basis of her management experience, to manage TSR.

Williams was able to deal with TSR's creditors and get money flowing back into the company again.

Gygax subsequently engineered the removal of Kevin Blume as CEO due to fiscal mismanagement.

However, Kevin's brother Brian had a longstanding stock option which he triggered; both brothers then sold their stock to Williams, making her the majority shareholder.

Gygax considered trying to fire Williams in order to replace her with his future wife, Gail Carpenter, but was advised not to.

Gygax did go to court to have the sale of stock declared illegal, claiming he had a verbal agreement with the Blume brothers to buy their stock.

When the judge ruled against him, Gygax sold his remaining stock and left TSR.

Williams was a financial planner who saw the potential for transforming the company into a highly profitable one.

However, she was described as supposedly disdained towards gaming, viewing herself as superior to gamers.

Former TSR employee Mike Breault has stated that he does not recall a rumored ban by Williams on playing games in the company during his time in TSR, but does go on to say that the vast majority of the products were not playtested.

Upon leaving TSR, Gygax had founded New Infinities Productions, Inc., and subsequently developed a new fantasy role-playing game, spanning multiple genres, called Dangerous Journeys.

When the product was released by Game Designers' Workshop, Williams immediately sued, claiming that the game infringed TSR's intellectual property.

The suit was eventually settled out of court, with TSR buying the complete rights to the Dangerous Journeys system from New Infinities and then permanently shelving the entire project.

With no product to sell, Gygax's new company was driven out of business.

Under Williams's direction, TSR initially maintained its leadership position in role-playing games, and solidified its expansion into other fields, such as magazines, paperback fiction, and comic books.

Through her family, Williams personally held the rights to the Buck Rogers license and encouraged TSR to produce Buck Rogers games and novels.

Williams gained control of TSR in October 1985 when the Blume brothers sold her their controlling shares of the company.

In 1988 she edited Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century.

TSR also published a Buck Rogers board game, a Buck Rogers XXVC role-playing game based on the AD&D 2nd Edition rules, over a dozen supplements for the role-playing game, comic books (1990–1991), a line of 11 novels and graphic novels (1989–1993), and two computer games produced by SSI (1990–1992).

As Williams' family owned Buck Rogers, TSR paid them royalties on the character.

However, in the early 1990s, TSR fell behind both Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast in terms of sales volume.

In 1996, an unexpectedly high cost of returned (unsold) fiction books and an expensive, unsuccessful foray into the collectible card game market caused a cash flow squeeze, and Williams sold TSR to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

Williams inherited the rights to Buck Rogers and a large collection of Buck Rogers memorabilia.

She sold the memorabilia at auction in 2010.